Transience and permanence on the web

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An RSS feed is forever.. that’s what I forgot in the Technorati post (now deleted) – in my desire to avoid Technorati’s quick blog registration (which requires sending a valuable password into the Technorati ether, perhaps forever…). Sorry all! (And boy have we paid for it with streams of junk comments from strip poker sites!).


Curiously, while we were instant messaging (i-Chat) about my Technorati foolishness, one, two, three, four yellow figure participants with names like “dalaboy” ran into the iChat window, and suddenly four perfect strangers were drawn into our conversation. They were as startled as we were. The old crossed telephone lines are now the new crossed ports?
Good things about permanence in e-space however – Linguistics people have been putting up papers on the Sydney e-Scholarship repository (using D-space). True, the rate of putting up is about the speed of a glacier before global warming.. But I was amazed to learn from Sten Christensen last week that the Linguistics material has extraordinarly good viewing rates. Top of the pops are the Proceedings of the ALS2004 Conference, edited by Ilana Mushin, and in particular THE top hit was Wayan Arka’s paper Challenges and Prospect of Maintaining Rongga: an Ethnographic Report with 460 viewings. Beats out “Open Access”, “Investment Managers”, and “The Benefits of growing crops after rice”. Not far behind (and relevant to the themes of this blog are Margaret Maclagan et al’s Acoustic Analysis of Maori: Historical Data with 349 views, and, moving away from ALS papers, Tom Honeyman’s Honours thesis Topic and focus in Ngardi with 301 hits. This should be an encouragement to all to distribute their work electronically through repositories that offer permanent URLs.

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